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The United States Senate displayed a mass failure of leadership yesterday when it killed, without even allowing an up-and-down vote, the measure that would have required background checks for sales of guns at gun shows and on the Internet and in other commercial transactions. The action was not really about differences of philosophy or Second Amendment rights, not when polls show that 80% to 90% of Americans favor expanded background checks. It was mainly about cowardice, in both parties. Democrats feared reelection challenges from the right. Republicans feared both electoral challenges and having to support both gun control legislation and immigration reform, two middle-of-the-road initiatives both backed by President Obama.

Moreover, the Senate defeated the bill in its most cowardly way, with a filibuster defeating the will of the majority of senators. The vote was as much a mark of dysfunction as of cravenness. As Gabrielle Giffords wrote this morning:

I was elected six times to represent southern Arizona, in the State Legislature and then in Congress. I know what a complicated issue is; I know what it feels like to take a tough vote. This was neither. These senators made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association, which in the last election cycle spent around $25 million on contributions, lobbying and outside spending.

The filibuster offended Americans across the political spectrum. It even provoked Joe Scarborough, the conservative former Republican Congressman from Florida, to say this on his show Morning Joe this morning:

It is unbelievable that for some reason my party is now defining conservatism as a promotion of gun trafficking for gang members across America, and my party is now, for some reason, embracing criminals and violent offenders . . . and Democrats, too.

That may be a very tough description of what the Senate caved in to, but it was hard to blame Lori Haas, the mother of a Virginia Tech victim, and Patricia Maisch, an Arizona mass shooting victim, when they shouted from the Senate gallery yesterday, "Shame on you!"